I wake up and enjoy the sunrise. While this is not my first choice of destinations it’s hard to beat this. Things could be worse.
Breakfast is a mish-mash of things I pick up at the cafeteria. I think this cost me $22 or thereabouts. And it was not delivered, I went to get it. The fruits alone were $3 each.
After breakfast I register for the conference then check out the booth where I will be on & off over the next 3 days.
I go back to the room to catch more of the awesome sunrise. You can see the hot air balloons in the image this time. Pretty solid way to start the day.
Then I work for a bit. I absolutely do not mind the travel for work and the working remotely and so on. But I really do not much like waking up and working in a hotel room. It’s so very loser-ish to me. I don’t know why.
I then head down to Evolve Bicycles to start my 3rd bike adventure series of this Florida trip. It wasn’t easy to find a place to rent a bike down here but I did finally manage to find this and I have to say, they were top notch and right in the heart of the Disney-mania area. The guys in the shop were super friendly and they gave me some solid advice on how to enjoy the ride and not get run over by the absurd traffic here.
Highly recommend this shop.
I ended up riding a route they suggested for a while but veered off and just kind of did my own thing, then I backtracked and retraced my steps back to the start, for the most part. It was nice being off the beaten path and seeing some terrain and landscape that’s a bit different than the normal flat & treeless shore terrain.
I mean, it’s not the Rocky Mountains but it’s a bit different. Oddly, this reminded me a bit of Austin road riding.
Strava link can be found here.
After the ride I went back to the hotel and got a sandwich at one of the places inside, then went out in the grass and sat and ate my lunch. This is sort of where the title of this post comes from. From the moment I set foot on the grounds here, I was out of place. But as I sat here, in the grass, I felt like an animal in the zoo that people would look at and wonder what the hell was wrong with me. This is not my sort of destination.
After lunch I went to the room to work & shower & do more hack laundry.
Then it was time for the show, which is why I was here for the first place. It was fine. I actually really enjoy these as I get to talk to people and maybe 1 in 4 people are genuinely interested in what you’re selling. Those conversations can be very interesting at times.
For dinner, I mistakenly agreed to join the crew which ended up being the 5 of us plus 4 other people that one of the sales morons agreed to bring with us. So it was of nominal value for me, as I really had no desire to spend 3 hours with most of these people. Of the 8 other people there, I enjoy talking to 2 of them. This is what conferences are. This is the part of the song and dance I don’t like.
Dinner was 4 Corners Tavern. If you’re ever there and legitimately starving to death, I guess you could do worse. But I’ll never willingly go back there unless, like I said, I was close to death due to lack of sustenance.
After dinner we all walk to the Publix across the street where I get some fruit at 1/6 the cost of what the hotel charges. Then we go back to the hotel and call it a night.
Traveling Normandy 